Macau is looking for Portuguese citizens to work. The multicultural territory continues to give priorities to local citizens, but there are multiple opportunities for foreigners, especially for those who want to escape the crisis or who are unemployed.
They are looking for lawyers due to having laws equal to those in Portugal, but not just this: they also need architects, engineers, specialized technicians and professionals in tourism.
The territory also has a great deal of construction, associated particularly with the hotel and tourist industry.
Perhaps more interesting though are the comments below the article, which can be seen here: pretty much all people looking for work. This is a typical one:
Estou interessado em ir trabalhar para Macau. Como faço para enviar curriculo. Tenho 25 anos e sou formado em restauraçao.
The Quebec Office of the French Language (OQLF) published five studies today on the language of commerce and business as well as languages used on the internet.
The display of company names shows a slight improvement between 2010 and 2012. The studies show that in 2012, 82% of shops had a company name that complies with the Charter of the French language in downtown Montreal, compared to 77% in 2020. This is a slight increase, especially with shops on the street, where compliance went from 78% to 85%.
The studies also reveal that French service in 2012 was available 95% of the time, about the same as that in 2010.
From an article here in French (automatically translated here). No time to write any more - somehow I ended up with things to do from 5 am to 1 am today.
The Portuguese government will put an end to smoking areas by 2020, according to a project by the Minister of Health that would prohibit the installation of these spaces in new establishments and provide a period of eight years to do away with existing ones.
The ministry is finalizing a set of proposals for "minor alterations" to the Tobacco act to guarantee a lower exposure of passive smoking, proposals that are to be presented "very soon".
"Our idea is to create a mechanism that prevents the installation of new places for smokers. Those that now have a place for smokers will have a moratorium to make it possible to amortize the investment, before applying the law barring smoking in all public places".
The prohibition on smoking in cars transporting children is another change desired by the Government: "It has been demonstrated that the concentration of smoke in the back of the vehicle is very large, and that plastics are embedded with carcinogenic material that is slowly released."
Eurobarometer data shows that 23% of Portuguese citizens are smokers. In the European Union this number is 28%. 70% of ex-smokers acquired the habit before turning 18.
The survey also concluded that the number of cigarettes smoked per days is 14.2, which represents a slight decrease from the 14.4 in the previous study in 2009. Half the population of the EU has never smoked and 61% of current smokers have tried to quit smoking before.
--- Two recently-discovered asteroids have flown by us at a very close distance of 51,000 km and 14,400 km. Because these asteroids always sneak up on us, NASA's near-Earth flyby page never gives a good indication of what is actually going to happen in the next few weeks: for all we know there could be another asteroid on its way and due to fly by (or hit) in a week.
These two are interesting because one actually could have caused a bit of damage. That one (2012 KP24) is 21 metres in diameter, the other (2012 KT42) is just 5 and would have burned up in the atmosphere. Here's what would happen with the larger one if you were a single kilometre away:
Atmospheric Entry:
The projectile begins to breakup at an altitude of 54000 meters
The projectile bursts into a cloud of fragments at an altitude of 20200 meters
The residual velocity of the projectile fragments after the burst is 10.4 km/s
The energy of the airburst is 1.32 x 10^15 Joules = 0.32 x 100 MegaTons.
No crater is formed, although large fragments may strike the surface.
Air Blast:
The air blast will arrive approximately 1.02 minutes after impact.
Peak Overpressure: 294 Pa = 0.00294 bars = 0.0417 psi
Max wind velocity: 0.692 m/s = 1.55 mph
Sound Intensity: 49 dB (Easily Heard)
Considering the tiny to nonexistent damage such an asteroid would cause, let's hope there's another one on its way right this moment, and that we discover it a week before it hits us.
--- The second part of the title is this post, a quick (based on one hour) but unbiased evaluation of Benny Lewis's Chinese (Mandarin) language skills after a few months: three months in Taiwan plus about a month and a half of traveling in mainland China. He had never learned an Asian language before (did learn some Hungarian though so not just Indo-European) but is a skilled/motivated language learner, so how much a person of his type can learn in this period of time is interesting to watch. The verdict: "a good B1". The post also has this interesting point:
If you look at his progress for someone who was in a full immersion program for three months and partly worked in English while studying (blog writing in his case) it is overall very impressive though. I would say it if he hadn’t been blogging in English while studying and had a few more grammar lessons with a good teacher he might have made it to spoken B2 level. To further progress he would need to start to focus more on Chinese characters though.
The point is interesting because there was not just a lot of blogging but also a lot of debate, such as here, here and here, much of which had a good amount of participation by Benny during his time in Taiwan. With a subject like this (aiming to learn a language like Chinese in three months) there's naturally a lot of debate, and the thing about debate is that it's very hard to ignore if you are the subject or someone in a thread is directly referencing you.
Ideally you would either do one of two things during a mission like this: 1) completely ignore all online debate (make that a hard and fast rule, no breaking it whatsoever) or 2) debate online in the language you are learning. 2) does depend on your level, but if you are a bit of a forum addict there are good ways to get your fix of debate - this site in Norwegian for example shows how easy it can be to debate about the same topics you might enjoy, but in another language, and any language of a given size will have places like these.
With Chinese this is naturally not really possible during the first month or two if you are starting from zero (so only rule 1) will apply), but for a lot of other languages you can get this fix right away.
Read more...
From here in French, an article about a Chinese-financed hospital to be constructed in Tunisia:
The People's Republic of China will construct a new Hospital-University Centre (Centre Hospitalo-Universitaire, CHU) in Sfax, with a capacity of 300 beds thanks to a donation of 30 million dollars...the centre is one of the most important development projects carried out by China in Tunisia...(praising Tunisia for its stability and stressing the importance of good bilateral relations, continuing on)...referring to cultural cooperation, Mr. Huo Zhengde (Chinese ambassador to Tunisia) announced that his country would open a Confucius Institute in Tunis to teach the Chinese language, which would be added to the first centre in Sfax. (Arabic: صفاقس Safāqus, Tunisian Arabic: [sˤfaːqs])
The Russian Alliance of Higher Education has begun interviews with candidates for medical school at the State University of Kursk, considered to be one of the best in Russia. The candidate must be up to 25 years old, and students that are not fluent in English have the option of attending preparatory school, where a student is given three months to prepare, and three months on top of this if necessary.
Medical courses in Russia are in high demand by Brazilians because of the incentives the Russian government gives to foreign students. Each student on average spends 7000 reals ($3500 USD) per year with travel expenses and housing, which represents an amount much smaller than private universities in Brazil. The university is located in Kursk, which has a low cost of living. Currently there are about 250 Brazilian students studying medicine in Russia.
Those who know the Russian language can enroll in post-graduate and doctorate courses. In these, students that are up to 36 years of age can stay in preparatory school for nine months to learn the language, and then enter the chosen course.
--- Space news is the obvious place to begin today, with SpaceX's Dragon capsule having successfully docked to (or rather, been captured by) the International Space Station. The mission so far has been flawless, aside from a delay of a few hours today when some sensors acted up. While a test mission, Dragon has also brought some useful cargo aboard as well so there is some immediate benefit to the ISS with this. Watching the webcast this morning was also quite entertaining, especially watching day turn to night and back to day again within a space of about 30 minutes each time.
And a video taken from the ISS. Imagine the thrill of seeing this fly below and then finally approach the next day:
For more on this...see pretty much any site or forum dedicated to space. Discussion abounds at the moment.
--- Space.com has a picture gallery here about the European Extremely Large Telescope. Because I often moan about how the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope will not be built this one seems small in comparison, but when you compare it to our existing telescopes it is truly massive. The two most impressive pictures are this one showing the size of the mirror:
And compared to the Very Large Telescope (actually four buildings) and the Giza pyramids:
--- An article here about the large amount of German tourists in Świnoujście, Poland, where "German has almost become a second language" at some hotels. Taking a look at the location this is no surprise:
--- A recent article here entitled Mandarin? No thanks. The gist of the argument is this:
Simply put, Mandarin is not the language of the future. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is its complexity. Mandarin is notoriously hard to learn as a second language, and many may only have a rudimentary grasp over it after years of arduous learning...The writing system for Mandarin is arcane, and it consists of thousands of symbols rather than a simple alphabet...Mandarin, unlike English, is also a tonal language, which may prove baffling for would-be-learners...Thus, relative to other languages, Mandarin is simply hard to master for the average English-speaker...English, in contrast, is mercifully easy for the foreign learner. This is one of the main reasons (along with a British knack for conquering) that it is the current global lingua franca.
So, where to begin? The main problem with this argument is that it is focused on the idea of Mandarin as learned by an English speaker. If Chinese is to expand, however, it will need to become popular or necessary in the closest countries to the PRC. That means countries like Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Thailand, etc. Japan, Korea and Vietnam are three obvious examples of countries that use Chinese characters (Japan), kind of do (Korea) or used to and still learn them in school (Vietnam). Tones: lots of languages use these, so no problem.
Vocabulary is particularly interesting. I was listening to a Chinese Pod lesson a few days ago, and one of the words that came up was 发达 (fādá, develop). No problem there: it's the same as Japanese hattatsu (発達) and Korean baldal (발달). But then they made sure to explain the difference between some other terms that can mean develop, like 发展 (fāzhǎn) and 开发 (kāifā), etc. But since all of these have the exact same equivalents in Japanese and Korean, anyone with those two languages as a mother tongue will simply learn them as is, in the same way that an English speaker learns terms like electricidad for electricity. No need for any extra explanations as there is nothing to explain in the first place except that "this word X is the same as your word Y".
There are often differences, but even then this is sometimes little more than a small point to be aware of: words like 介绍 (Jièshào, introduce) are written backwards in Japanese and Korean but mean the same thing, or meaning may be somewhat different in the same way that actual or ignore in English carries a reminiscent but different meaning in other European languages (actual = current, ignore = not know).
None of this means that Mandarin is guaranteed a place as the world's international language, but considering where China's main interests lie at the moment (the region where it is located), there's little reason to divine its future based on the ease of learning it for those who live much farther away.
Here's a video by Ed Trimnell also responding to the editorial. So far I've listened to half of it and I agree with what I've heard so far.
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